remember, to search for an entire phrase, you need to put parentheses around your search term

Click the 'Show options' dropdown.

Deliver to: if you use an RSS reader (like Feedly), you can change this option to have your search results updated there. If you do not, you will get the results emailed to you. If you choose to email the results, make sure the 'How often' setting is *not* 'as it happens' otherwise you may find your inbox flooded.

Click 'Create Alert'

You can even set the time to get alerts delivered, or have all of them combined into 1 email by going into your settings.

Social Media

If you are using social media management tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social, you can set up searches to keep an eye on your brand. The searches you want are the same as the ones you set up for your Google Alerts, but should also include any hashtags that are specific to your business.

Note: even if you are not using a social media management tool, you can still do these searches directly on the networks, but you may not be able to save the search query and it will take more time if you search many networks.

Keep in mind that no matter how much you search, you will never find everything due to privacy settings on social networks - the information you are finding is publicly available.

Photos

If you publish photos or graphics you may also want to see who else (if anyone) has been using them. Remember, as the creator you hold the copyright to those photos and can ask people to remove your photos if they are using them without permission or are taking credit for them.